


to take the sun in your mouth

by fatalize



Series: Fruits Basket Childhood [3]
Category: Fruits Basket
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-28 02:46:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15038981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatalize/pseuds/fatalize
Summary: As a child, Ayame was given the freedom to do whatever he wanted, and so he did exactly that.





	to take the sun in your mouth

**Author's Note:**

> As I've been saying with the other drabbles, I didn't have a solid age in mind when writing this lol (and was, of course, too lazy to look anything up). My thinking went like this -- if, in the manga, Yuki is ~16, Akito is ~20, and Ayame is ~26, then in this fic, Yuki is 0, Akito is 4, and Ayame would be around 10. Or something. That's roughly how old they should be, anyway. So with that in mind, here is kid Ayame.

            When his mother told him that he would have a younger brother soon Ayame didn’t care much. What did that mean to him, the only child—what did it mean to have a sibling? Hatori and Shigure were only children as well; the whole Sohma estate put up a front of family but it was a distant thing, an unconnected thing. What was he supposed to feel?

            Mostly he thought it strange, that the only reason his mother was doing this was because she was unsatisfied, somehow. His mother was a refined lady more suited to lipstick and pearls and business suits than cooking and cleaning and general housewifely duties. In the occasional moments when he felt pity for his mother he knew she had probably not been one by choice, had only done what was expected of her, or something like that.

            How draining, he thought, to lease your heart and soul to the rules of a world that only desired to leech your energy to uphold itself and cared not about your personal feelings.

            But he couldn’t complain, because in his father’s absence and his mother’s wavering feelings of responsibility to her assigned role of motherhood, as well as the vastness of the Sohma estate and its wealth—not to mention the status that came with being one of the twelve zodiac—Ayame was given freedom to do whatever he wanted, and so he did exactly that.

            The fact that he could transform into a snake was a minor inconvenience at most, even though it happened for him more easily than it did Shigure or Hatori.

            The first time it happened at school was right before summer break. It was hot, too hot for his sensitive skin, although the other children didn't seem to mind as much. He had hid somewhere outside for shade, and before he knew it—poof! He was a snake.

            Since he couldn’t very well go back to class like that, he nestled himself in the cool grass in the shade until the noon sun had started lowering. When it was nearing the time school would let out, Ayame transformed back. It was too late to go back inside and too early to go home—so Ayame did what he did best and wandered where he felt like.

            When he got into town he wondered briefly if anyone would think him suspicious or stop him, but it was so close to the time school was supposed to be let out that he didn’t care. He would go into stores whenever it started feeling too hot and enjoyed the air conditioning. The grocery store was especially nice in the frozen aisle, but eventually he would go back out in the heat, not liking the opposite extreme temperature too much either.

            His skin, his overly delicate transforming skin. If he was the kind of person to think too darkly, perhaps he would have thought he was trapped by his skin, its cursed sensitivity to heat, to cold, to touch.

            But this tragic rendition of his life didn’t hold much interest for him—really, he mostly only cared about the privilege his status granted him, the notion that he was special. Perhaps others would consider it a misfortune, but what was unfortunate in things that, to him, were only natural? What use was there of self-pity when he did not view himself as limited, incapable?

            Only fairly recently did the zodiac children have a newfound fascination with God.

            Ayame, like the rest, had felt his heart moved one morning, aware of the existence of God in their lives, a profound feeling of—was it love? Perhaps it was something like that. Love. It wasn’t an emotion he was all too familiar with yet. And even so Ayame thought that God, like his mother, was to be forced into a role they did not choose, and would perhaps comply to it unquestioningly.

            Really, rather than dramatic, some of the circumstances of the Sohma were merely an undignified mess, he thought. If they were content to obey the wills of others, that was their choice. Ayame, however, would continue to do as he pleased.

            As the heat began to bear down again Ayame ended up in another store, this time more of a general one. He wandered down one aisle, then another, then stopped—something caught his eye—a flash of red in the corner of the next aisle, and there

            were a bunch of parasols.

            A parasol! Of course that would work against the sun—why hadn’t he thought of it sooner? And there were so many different styles here—the bright red one, with its scattering of cherry blossom petals—the white one, with its lace and sparrows—a multi-colored and patterned one, with small squares and triangles, rows of lines and crosses and intense detail.

            How lovely they were, how varied, how useful; he wanted one. His mind flickered briefly to his mother again—ever since the news of his yet-to-be younger brother, it seemed like she was on his mind a lot—and how she might disapprove of it. She had already made him cut his hair—it was getting too long, she said, he couldn’t look like a girl, she said, he needed to look more refined and befitting of the Sohma family. He had complied, because he didn’t have strong feelings at the time about it and it was obviously important to her—but he was curious about how long he could grow it, what he could do with longer hair.

            Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that it would be better for both him and his mother if he did what he wanted. She was so tense, wasn’t she, too concerned and anxious and uptight about things that, in the end, did not really matter to him. If structure and rules really were that important, he wouldn’t be skipping school right now with an unburdened conscious. His mother could learn to benefit from this kind of thinking, too.

            Ayame took the multi-colored parasol and opened it above his head, twirling it all the way to the checkout.

**Author's Note:**

> After I finished writing this, I ended up thinking, "...so there's no dialogue, huh." Which only struck me as odd because Ayame... is Ayame haha. But! There will be more Ayame to come, which means he will get to ramble a bit in a future drabble or two.
> 
> As for the content of this fic, is this something I actually believe happened? Maybe not. But that is the beauty of fic, the freedom and ability to do whatever I want. Despite Ayame's usual bombastic and long-winded self, I wanted to dig inside him and give him a stage that would allow some sort of character study. So I hope it ended up being worth reading a little.


End file.
